The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

Monday, June 04, 2007

Giuliani

Quite the article in Rolling Stone called Giuliani: Worse Than Bush. Thats quite the statement but Matt Taibbi does a pretty good job laying out the reasons. He starts by taking some cheap shots at the guys appearance but then again this is Rolling Stone.

The basic argument is that this is a man with a price tag pure and simple, he can be bought and is more than happy to be bought, so long as the price is right, and he's not cheap. But then again he's a politician you can buy any of them if your pockets are deep enough. He's just a bit more obvious about it than others. So Taibbi goes a step further he attacks Giuliani not at his weakness but at his strength. He takes on Giuliani for his handling of 9/11. Credit is given where its due, on that fateful day Giuliani was there, he was the leader that the country needed and was sorely lacking from the federal government. On that day Giuliani shined, but he's been riding that wave for too long. Yes he was great on that day, thats one day where he was a leader that cannot make up for all the other failures. There were internal failures like the lack of communication that kept fire-fighters from getting out before the towers collapsed, but that can hardly be blamed on any one person. The big failure that was caused by Rudy was the WTC cleanup. This is an important part of the article, and should be looked at by the country at large now that he is running for president. After the continued failure of Katrina we need a president that can do more than make an impassioned speech at the site of a catastrophe, we need a president that cares enough about the people to put his weight behind fixing problems as they arise. We would like to prevent disasters but they happen, we try to be as well prepared as possible to minimize death and damage but they will still happen, and when they do we need leaders who will make sure that our country get put back together again. So with those thoughts in mind lets take a quick look at Rudy's work at cleaning up the WTC site. First he did it himself rather than get federal help, I don't know enough about it to know if this was a good move or not. He gave the contracts to those with connections to him, this is corruption at its most blatant but its also par for the course so we can let this slide.

The big issue was the air in lower Manhattan following the attack. I was an inebriated sophomore in college on that day and yet I remember hearing about how toxic the air was. There were a lot of things burning and it only made sense that some of those burning things would be bad for you. As I said I was usually not sober at that time some my memory is missing some details but I distinctly remember hearing actual numbers for the carcinogens in the air, it was clear to a layman that this was an area that should probably entered with a haz-mat suit, or at least a full respirator. In those early days when so much was unclear I heard that report along with a warning that this information was being suppressed, and I never heard about it again for the most part. Now many people have died because of the cleanup, the article even says that its possible that more people died in the cleanup than the attack. Reminds me of Iraq, won the war, lost the peace. No need to get off topic on this one. I'm not nearly as well informed about all of the candidates as I would like to be but I think I can say with a clear conscious that I know enough about Rudy, and unlike the movie I hope he never runs onto the field with a gold helmet.